The State of Emoji Literature

It's not very lit. ☹️

Before I turn my focus more toward The Journal of Wordplay’s inaugural issue, I want to talk a quick look at the current state of emoji literature. Like a lipogram, an emoji story uses a different “alphabet” than the twenty-six letters we’re used to. Some emoji stories use only emoji, exchanging one alphabet for another, arguably universal one. Some of them put emoji alongside traditional words, broadening the expressive possibilities of language by using every sign that an English-speaker can understand.

I love telling stories through pictures, so I’m excited by the possibilities here. But so far…I’d say those possibilities are still mostly untapped.

The Book Written Entirely Out of Emoji, by YarnStore, is a good way to turn yourself off the whole concept. This 166-line construction—a little short even by novella standards—has a few arresting and interesting moments, but more often it just reads as incomprehensible nonsense.

Some of us had higher hopes for Emoji Dick, or 🐋, by Fred Bennenson. This ambitious project used Amazon’s Mechanical Turk and online voting to “find” matching emoji for each line of the original text of Moby Dick. The results are…sadly underwhelming. The inclusion of that original text means one can read it smoothly, but I wracked my brain trying to connect its lines to their emoji accompaniments.

Some of the text’s problems are due to age. It was produced in 2009, and emoji have come a long way since. (Queequeg could actually be Black now, as he couldn’t then.) But even today’s “vocabulary” is inadequate to the story: the closest emoji to a harpoon is a trident, and emoji whales have one default color, more often blue or gray than white. To do this right, you’d have to be willing to design new emoji for the task, not just use what’s already available.

There have been other such emoji “translations,” using the original text, using part of it, eschewing it altogether. Artist Joe Hale made a name for himself by translating the texts of Alice in Wonderland, Peter Pan, and Pinocchio. There’s an Emoji Bible available on iBooks, from an author who uses the “sunglasses guy” emoji 😎 as a pseudonym. Some of these works do well as a sort of puzzle where you guess at each word the emoji signify. Some are aesthetically interesting…

But none of them engage the consciousness as something to read instead of just decoding and looking at. I don’t think this means long-form emoji works are impossible, just that they’re in a very young phase. It took time for longer movies to come into their own and stop imitating stage plays. The same principle applies here. We need to figure out emoji’s “native” powers of expression before we can tell any story with them, whether adapted or original.

Book from the Ground: From Point to Point by Xu Bing might point the way. Like Ulysses, Book from the Ground is confined in scope to 24 hours; unlike Ulysses, this 24-hour period goes from 7 AM to 7 AM. Our protagonist wakes up, goes to work, goes on a date, worries about his love life and the state of the world, and has an uneasy sleep. Bing freely mixes symbols taken from different systems, including corporate logos, to create an experience that words alone can’t offer.

I can’t say it’s always easy to interpret: I puzzled over some of the later pages’ specific incidents. But it is a rewarding new way of looking at the everyday world and everyday life. As qualifications for literature go, that’s an impressive hurdle to clear.